If you keep pursuing "jobs" as our way out of the economic and budgetary hole we're in, and you keep raising regulatory hurdles to create better benefits for workers, you will pile-drive our economy further and further beneath faster-growing and more nimble economies in Asia and Latin America.

That doesn't mean there aren't things you can do that will help the poor make a living and help restore the health of the middle class. The good news is that there are great and powerful forces at work in our economy that are making it easier than ever for people to build meaningful income streams. But not through jobs.

Be advised: Things no longer work the way the American economic storybook (which you're all always reading from in your speeches) says they do.

So please: Stop what you're doing. It's time to align our nation with those huge forces that are driving economic change and prepare for a very different-looking future.

The American economy is restructuring itself, whether we like it or not, to produce more output with fewer jobs. The numbers: The federal government says that in 2002 there were roughly 130 million jobs in the U.S. That year, we created $10.6 trillion worth of goods and services, in constant 2011 dollars.

Nine years later, in 2011, there were 132 million jobs — averaging 225,000 jobs added per year — but we created $15.1 trillion worth of goods and services.

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A little over 1 percent more jobs. And 42 percent more output.

That doesn't represent some massive labor-productivity jump. The 132 million people working in jobs grew only slightly more productive each year — less than 2 percent on average.

So what's been happening over the past decade or so? The Internet and related information technologies have created a flourishing independent, self-directed, non-"job"-based economy. It's faster, more efficient and more adaptable than anything ever created — and it's only going to get better. If we let it.

The Government Accountability Office estimates there are 42 million Americans working independently as sole proprietors, consultants, contract laborers, etc. — economic free agents, in other words, increasingly using those Internet tools and platforms to make things happen in the economy. All without the creation of a single job. Work, yes. Income, yes. One-person businesses, yes. But a job, as we have thought of it? No.

Most companies today can find a way to break apart and outsource almost every task in their value chain that formerly specifically required an employee's attention. Freelance and skilled-contract-labor platforms such as Odesk, Elance, Getacoder and hundreds of others allow simple and complex activities to be quickly handed off to highly capable people and teams around the U.S. and across the globe.

Now, when government requirements and regulation jack up the cost of employing someone, it's easier than ever for companies to simply fix their "machine" through means other than hiring someone new.

So Mr. President, Mr. Speaker: You can dislike this change as much as you want, but you can't stop this wave. Not without cratering everything that is innovative and powerful about our economy. Efforts to preserve some 1950s ideal of what a job is and what bucket of compensation, benefits and obligations go with it are futile.

To tune our sails to the big winds that are blowing, we need a public dialogue to identify and agree on these new information-driven economic forces and think through their societal implications. We need to realize that labor law as we Americans have forged it — all centering on the idea that a "job" working in a "company" is the main economic reality — must be rethought for an era of freewheeling transactions between smaller, more focused companies and intelligent free-agent individuals.

We need to find ways to decouple health care from employment, through either a private or public system. We need to make it easy and rewarding for people to make the transition from "jobs" to "work," and from predictable weekly paychecks to less certain but more lucrative and more flexible entrepreneurial and personal income streams.

We need to turn our educational system from the goal of preparing students to take a job following directions to the goal of preparing individual economic actors to take their place as more self-guided free-agent contributors to a vibrant 21st-century economic fabric. We need to knock off the tax-code gimmicks and outdated employer incentives for hiring and replace them with aggressive open frameworks that encourage experimentation and innovation without punishing failure in organizational and work formats.

Adapting to the economic revolution will require vision, communication, shared sacrifice, trust and mutual risk-taking by workers, companies, investors and political leaders. And it will be hard.

But not harder than fighting the irresistible forces of technological change and economic history.

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